You'll Just Have to Take me Out Back and Shoot Me
and why not, it's as good a time as ever
there is nothing more essential to me than bjork. substack has a stat where they show me if u clicked the link so this is me pointing a gun at u and saying play the song and nobody gets hurt 🔫
Feeling sorta displaced lately so I’ve been going to a disgusting amount of movies. Seriously, way too many. It’s not stopping in the next few days either. Apologies to all involved, I’ll do my best to pick up after myself.
I even cried at a theater the other day. Whoops. #1 goal of going out in public is not embarrassing yourself so it’s always a little unfortunate when you fuck it up. Congrats, you violated the social contract. Nobody wants to see that. My goal should be to slip in and out as quietly as possible and I seem to be fucking it up left and right these days.
The theater in question? On this occasion, some shitshow behind The Crocodile, in Belltown. You enter through an alley in the back and you ignore the looks of those guys that always slum it there. You came dressed too nice because you’re always hoping the fit will spark a conversation but usually it doesn’t even score you a wary side-eye. You spent the previous hour alone at Shorty’s trying to trick life into Happening to you but there’s no point because you have to have sold out in life to even be allowed into a Belltown bar. You need to be a card-carrying tech worker. They check your badge at the door.
Anyways. The theater.
Totally empty. There’s a bar in the foyer but nobody’s there except a waitress with hoops hanging from every possible part of her body. She looks like a musical instrument, which is ironic because she has no interest at all in talking. It’s 2 AM and I’m the first customer she’s had for awhile and I can’t even be bothered to order something more interesting than a Moscow Mule. It’s not my fault drinks confuse me. My goal when I order from the bar is to make the experience as greasy as possible - no friction, no social interaction, eliminate all potential source of faux-pas - and everyone understands the Moscow Mule as a drink of preemptive social surrender. She rolls her eyes and makes it for me and I’ll be god damned if she didn’t spike it a bit. 2 AM. Anything goes.
The theater is dark when I walk in. It seats 20 people but I’m alone in there now. I sit right in the center and the seats are nicer than a back alley deserves. The screen is a makeshift projector pulled down from the ceiling and the speakers are sitting in the corners of the room instead of concealed behind paneling. There’s still a microphone in the center of the stage area beside a stool with a half-empty Dasani. There was a crowd here once, clearly, but they didn’t come here for movies. They came here for an comedy act or something. It’s pretty obvious that movies were never meant to be viewed here and I start to wonder what kind of psycho even bothers to organize this when the only person coming is me. Jeff McMahon. Congratulations this is what your advertising and efforts have resulted in: your prize is a blog from a white guy about going to Belltown and harping on how sad and lonely your theater is.
And I mean the vibes really are that desolate. Just an awful, awful place to be when you have no idea what you’re doing with your life. A back alley dungeon haunted by the ghost of mediocre open-mic comics floating in, coughing, tapping the mic, is this thing on? I can still taste some of the stale beer some drunk guy spat out laughing at some pasty millenial’s half-baked crowdwork. It dissolved into the air and now it’s in my mouth. It’s so dark in here, and so empty, but it gives that horrible lasting impression that love exists in the world, that human connection is real, and you’re simply missing it because it’s all taking place in rooms that everyone vacated before you got there. Life really is a big party after all, its just that everyone was invited but you. It would be better if this place wasn’t so lived in.
The movie starts and two guys walk in. They’re short and awkward and they’re exuding a certain sense of tentative romance. They don’t seem to be particularly sure of whatever relationship they’ve got. By which I mean to say - they’re clearly both deeply into each other but it doesn’t seem like they’ve figured out that the other likes them. So they’re suspended in this very visible self-consciousness and God knows I’m not helping. I vaguely recognize one of the guys from the ad I saw for this showing on instagram, so he’s probably the one who put rented out the theater and put the movie on. They are both shocked to see me. I get it. I’d be shocked to see me. Who would want me there? They’ve got enough uncertainties on their plate. They move to the corner of the theater as Days commences its slow, inevitable march to nowhere, into nothing.
Days (2020) - Tsai Ming-Liang
Hard to write about this movie without being trite. It made me so sick to my stomach. I love Tsai Ming-Liang so much. There are many acclaimed directors of deep emotional heft that I don’t quite understand. At least not to their absolute extent. I’ve been watching Bresson and I enjoy everything I see. I’m even moved on some occasions. But something about Tsai’s films speak to me on such a fundamental level that I have the opposite of an out-of-body experience; I become deeply conscious of myself. Everything within me rises to the surface.
Nothing happens in Days, of course. Nothing ever happens in Tsai movies, but he’s truly leaning further and further into it the older he gets. There are maybe nine or ten shots in the entire film. Mostly, it’s two men existing. They go from place to place. They’re washing vegetables, or lighting incense, or staring off somewhere in the distance.
There’s probably no other filmmaker on the planet who makes you feel the true, unbearable weight of time passing. I’m not talking about tedium. I’m talking about the feeling that each second is sanding away a little bit more of you. You’re born with all your time ahead of you, and each moment is you drifting further and further away from that until you die. Each second you spend alone is irreversible. The percentage of your life that will be spent alone ticks upwards.
Eventually, Lee Kang-Sheng (the staple of all of Tsai’s films, and arguably the greatest muse of the 20th century) and this other man (Anong Houngheuangsy) find each other. One night, in a hotel room, they have a wordless sexual encounter. Their relationship is transactional (Kang-sheng has hired a sex worker) but at the same time it’s tender in a way that renders me catatonic. It’s a funny thing, with Kang-sheng; I’ve seen him be more or less the same guy in so many Tsai movies that when he gets this fractional little moment of relief in Days, it feels like a release from not just the previous hour but from several films of suffering and loneliness and malaise. Inevitably, it ends. They shower off and he pays the man for the sex. Transaction done. But he also gives him a little music box. They leave the hotel and go their separate ways, back into the city, back into reality.
Later on, after he has wandered wordlessly through some more grimy city streets. Houngheuangsy tries to play the music box. It can only barely be heard above the noise of the street. This is when I started crying.
The movie ended and those guys were still in the corner. I got the sense that they expected nobody else to be there, and that I was transgressing. I left and went to Denny’s. I didn’t find anything there, but it was a hell of a lot better than Belltown.
When I feel truly alone one of the lasting images that surfaces in my head is a scene near the end of Vive l’Amour which I won’t bother describing but I’ll just show some images here and go cry in a corner.
So wonderful to see this guy encounter some love. He finds it so rarely. But it’s out there. Even if it leaves you and can barely even hear the music you’re playing for it.
Anna Karenina (again)
I finally finished it. A beautiful cautionary tale about passionate love. That’s right. That type of love where you completely lose yourself in someone else? Tolstoy says that it’s bad. That it can’t last. That it will ruin you, and your lover, and your country.
He’s right, obviously, but everyone already knows that. Knowing it doesn’t change anything. I don’t care what logic says, I don’t care what my brain tells my body to want. My body knows that all I want is to sink into someone else so deeply that people can’t even tell where I begin. I want to be eliminated. I want to be held entirely within someone else. I want to look out the window like a puppy when they’re not around and I want to die when I know they’ve left. I want to open my mouth and hear another voice come out. I want to collide into a person with so much power we form a new atom. I want to go crazy and lose myself and be chewed up and spat out and dumped in a puddle by the side of the road and I want someone else to feel exactly the same way about me.Tolstoy wags his finger and tells me It’s Gonna Fuck Me Up but that’s cool. I don’t care. Can’t really state this enough - there’s no changing my mind. I’m either dying with it or I’m dying without it im never gonna stop being this way if you want it to end youre going to have to take me out back and shoot me. and even then i might come crawling back because nothings ever gonna stop me. this is the only thing in my brain that is steadfast, the only thing in my life that is certain.
Even if Tolstoy says it’s Toxic he does a good enough job articulating it that I’m really happy that I read the book.